Ed McBain: Cinderella

She was all business.

“I’d like to see the money, please,” she said.

“We would like to see the dope, please,” Ernesto said.

“The money first.”

Ernesto looked at Domingo.

“You afraid I’ll bop you on the head and steal it?” she said, and smiled.

The smile made her look more like the girl in the pictures. The smile and the blue eyes.

“So?” she said.

Ernesto was just realizing she wasn’t carrying any kind of bag. So where was the dope?

“You don’t have the dope?” he said.

“It’s coming,” she said.

“Coming?”

“A friend is bringing it.”

“A friend?”

“In a car. He’s only a few minutes behind me.”

Ernesto went to the window, spread two Venetian blind slats with his fingers and looked out. He saw a tall, dark-haired man coming out of the motel office and getting into a tan, foreign-looking car. The car door closed behind him. The car started.

“Is that him?” Ernesto asked.

She went to the window, looked out. “No,” she said, “he’s driving a blue Ford. That’s a Karmann Ghia.” The car moved past in the rain. She turned away from the window. “So?” she said. “Do I see the money, or do we forget the whole thing?”

She was playing it very hard considering how badly she wanted this deal. She’d been waiting for this deal to come along ever since they arrived in Calusa at the beginning of April. Maybe she’d been waiting for this deal ever since she went to California to become a great big movie star. She would have turned free tricks for the entire Russian army to get this deal. Please God, she thought, don’t let anything happen to screw up this deal.

Ernesto was thinking if she isn’t the girl, who needs the dope she’s selling at sixty-five a key? We’ve got other people waiting who’ll sell for only sixty a key.

Domingo was thinking the same thing.

“So what do you say?” she said. “Do we deal or do we just stand here staring at each other?”

“Get the money,” Ernesto said to Domingo.

He wanted to study her face a little longer, make sure.

He could always tell her later to take a walk.

Matthew’s cabin smelled of Lysol. There was a dresser with cigarette scars on it and a flaking mirror over it. There was an air conditioner in the window. There was a plaid cover on the bed. There was a telephone on a nightstand beside the bed. In the bathroom, there was a plastic glass on the sink, and a loop of paper on the toilet seat, telling him it had been sanitized. He went to the window and opened the Venetian blinds. He could not see cabin number three from here. All he could see was the asphalt rectangle where he’d parked his car. A red LeBaron convertible was parked there, too, alongside the girl’s white Toyota.

He was about to close the blinds again when a blue Ford pulled in alongside his car.

Hollister.

Carrying a valise.

It was ten minutes past twelve by Vincent’s watch.

She had told him to give her a half-hour in there. That would be time enough to count the money. There was nothing they could take from her, so she didn’t feel herself in any danger. If the money wasn’t all there or if God forbid there wasn’t any money at all , she’d simply say good-bye.

Twenty minutes to go, he thought.

He was in the cabin they had booked last night. Cabin number five. Booked it for two days, paid the man in advance. All she had to do after she counted the money was send somebody over to test the dope.

The dope was in the valise on the bed.

All Vincent had to do was wait.

Which was the hard part.

The money was in hundred-dollar bills, neatly stacked in a dispatch case. Jenny took the bills out of the case and began counting them. Vincent had been hoping for hundred-dollar bills, but this made the counting harder for her. All the while she counted, both men watched her intently. Not her hands riffling the bills as she counted them, but her face.

Kept looking at her face.

The bills were wrapped in narrow paper wrappers, supposed to be a thousand dollars in each stack, but Jenny wasn’t taking any chances on being shortchanged. She was counting every bill in each wrapper. Two hundred and forty little stacks of bills, neatly wrapped with $1000 stamped on each wrapper. Plus five loose hundred-dollar bills, which she counted first.

They kept watching her.

One of them said something in Spanish to the other one.

She kept counting.

She had counted a hundred and five thousand dollars when the short one said, “Miss Santoro?”

Her hands stopped.

Her heart stopped.

She looked up from the neatly wrapped bills on the tabletop.

The big one with the slick little mustache was standing there with an open switchblade knife in his hand.

The other one had a photograph in his hand.

“This is you, no?” he said.

Twelve thirty-five by Vincent’s watch and nobody knocking on the door.

What the hell was going on in there?

How long could it possibly take someone to count two hundred and forty thousand dollars? And some change. Had they brought the money in singles ? Had they broken into someone’s piggy bank?

She had to be still counting the money in there because she’d told him she would simply leave if there was any kind of hitch.

So there had to be money in there and it had to be real money or she’d have split right away.

So she had to be counting it.

But what was taking her so long?

“This one, too,” Ernesto said, and showed her another picture.

“No, that’s not me, either,” she said.

It was her, all right. It was her in LA at that producer’s party where she’d blown him later in the toilet for three hundred bucks. And the other picture was one taken on the beach at Malibu where a girlfriend of hers... where’d he get these pictures?

“My name is Sandy Jennings,” she said. “I don’t know who this girl—”

“And this,” he said.

Another recent one. At San Simeon when she’d gone up there with the same girlfriend who by the way was a hooker. She’d sent it to her mother last year sometime, dumb picture of her standing in front of—

“None of those are me,” she said.

“They’re you,” Ernesto said.

“Look, you want to deal dope,” she said, toughing it out, “or you want to look at pic—”

And Domingo cut her.

When Vincent heard the scream, the only thing he thought was that his money was in jeopardy. He did not give a rat’s ass about Jenny. All he cared about was the money they were supposed to get for the dope. He had already done quite a bit to protect the dope and the money he hoped to get for it, and he had not come all this way to have two Spanish gentlemen from Miami walk off with what he considered rightfully his own.

He pulled the .38 from the waistband of his jeans, stepped out into the rain, and started running toward cabin number three.

The owner of the motel was reading that morning’s newspaper when he heard the second scream. His gray raincoat and rainhat were hanging on a wall hook to the left of his desk. There was a picture of Madonna in the nude hanging on the wall alongside a calendar. The owner had never heard Madonna sing.

What he decided to do, he decided to ignore the screams.

Because every now and then somebody would smack a girl around in one of the cabins and there was a lot of screaming and fussing but it all worked out later in the sack. One of the things you learned in the motel business was that everything sooner or later worked itself out in the sack. Which was why he never called the police when anybody started screaming or yelling.

One of the switchboard lights popped on.